The Bees Knees-Part 2

This update is about a week and a half late. My kids and I awoke one morning to assemble the frames for the brood boxes. Brood boxes are the areas where the queen will lay the eggs and small amounts of honey will be produced. We had some preassembled plastic foundation for one hive and the other hive we were using wire reinforced beeswax foundation. The beeswax foundation needs to be attached and nailed to the frames. I am interested to see how the bees accept the plastic foundation. From what I understand the bees like the beeswax foundation more but it is not as easy to work with as the plastic. So we assembled the foundations and were awaiting the call from the post office for our bees. I ordered two queens and three pounds of bees for each hive. As I recall, three pounds of bees equals about 12,000 bees, so I ordered about 24,000 bees.
I received a call about 6:20 am from our local post office a few day later (I was at work until about 2 am that morning). They called to let me know that my bees had arrived. I threw the kids in the car and we headed over to the post office. As we were leaving our mail carrier yelled "Nathaniel!" He had noticed that we had a new address. I had the bees sent to our farm and not our rental like usual. He noticed the new address and asked us about it. Where else, other than in a small town, would your postal carrier notice something like that and want to talk to you about it. We then took the bees home and sprayed them with some sugar water to feed them. I headed on over to the farm later that afternoon and set up the site for the hives. My boss came over to help me install the bees. He lives "next door" and keeps some bees himself. We installed both hives. Two days later I returned to see if the queens had made their way out of their queen cages. Both queens were out. The hive was busy drawing out frame. Watching these bees up close is fascinating. I could stand and watch them for a long time. It was quite an experience to pull out a frame just crawling with bees. In a few days it will be about two weeks and I will go place my queen excluders on the hive with a super or two for each hive. A super is the boxes and frames that the queen cannot get to (with the excluder between the brooder and super). This is where the worker bees will place the honey. All of this and I have not received one sting yet. I wore a veil, jacket and gloves. I opted against buying the full bee suit and so far it seems a wise choice. My boss wrote a prescription for epinephrine pen in case we had an allergic reaction to the stings.
I didn't get any pictures of the installation of the bees because my dear wife was not over at the farm when we installed them.